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Frontpage or Dreamweaver 8?

I am a relative newbie to web design, and have been using Frontpage for the past year or so for all my web publications.

I have recently purchased Flash Pro 8 and I'm having great fun with the features it has to offer and incorporating them into my webs via Frontpage.

Now I am wondering what DW8 has to offer and whether it is worthwhile taking the leap from Frontpage or not.

Are there lots of complicated concepts I need to get up to speed with or can I just pick up where Frontpage left off? Will I notice a HUGE difference?

Will I be able to "convert" (for the want of a better word) my FP pages into DW8 formats without and problems?

Final question, (and thank you for your patience), but I like the sync features you get with FP. I make a few changes to my websites on my PC and then FP syncs up to the webserver/s, works out what changes have been made, and updates the necessary files. I assume DW8 has this feature (note, I do not run any server features on my editing PC, it's just a plain old desktop).

I would say all the WYSIWYG editors are not good!! so it is better not to use any of them!
You can take a look here And you will find many nice editors with their pricing etc...
But if you want to compare MS FrontPage to Adobe Dreamweaver 8.0 well my friend Dreamweaver wins this one hands down!
Frontpage is crappy...

Both Frontpage and Dreamweaver are decent WYSIWYG tools. They can be a big timesaver to the professional or a detrimental crutch for the newbie.

Your choice of an HTML editor should be based on how you work and what's best for you after you have learned to write good markup by hand. Few people do this anymore however. They start with a WYSIWYG editor, then learn more about markup and run into the limitations of such programs. They then decide that all WYSIWYG is worthless and everyone should use a text editor for everything (or they're not really professionals).

Having been through many editors over the years, I can tell you that they all have their flaws and quirks. Most people around here will tell you (as you can see above) that DW is superior to FP. Indeed many will give you no respect if you work in FP (because of honest criticism of the program or hatred for anything from Microsoft) - so if that's the choice get DW, swallow the steeper learning curve and the ridiculously crowded and confusing interface and you can feel good knowing that you have a 'professional level' tool and the approval of all here.

Except the ones who will tell you that you should really be using VIM on UNIX.

What is it you are really looking for? Is there something in DW that FP will not do for you?

What is it you are really looking for? Is there something in DW that FP will not do for you?

This is my real question. What more will I get from DW8 and is it really worth changing brands for the differences?

I'll be honest, at the moment as much as I have a shelf full of books on HTML, Java, CSS, Flash, PHP, etc, learning and understanding the code to be able to write web pages in text editors is not my first priority. Don't get me wrong, I do want to learn and become an expert, but I also need to get some quick results in the meantime.

I have never compared FP to anything before. The website I manage is growing each day so if I need to make a switch I'd rather do so sooner rather than later. But I don't want to switch unless there is a benefit in doing so.

learn how to hand code! and you will see that text editors are the best!
can't use FP for PHP etc...DW can be used in the code view to produce a good code, in the design code DW will generate a so so code
but this is just my opinion!

For someone who wants the ease of use of FrontPage with the higher quality output of Dreamweaver, N|vu is most recommended.

When you are up to handcoding N|vu will be adequate and help you ease the transition to a text editor of some kind - which you will at some point require so you can have complete control over your code and produce better code than a generator.

For the record, properly configured FrontPage can be more than adequate for most HTML needs, but out of the box it tends to "jack your code" in ways that aren't so desirable. N|vu is similar in that you can have it reformat your code as best it can (good for newbies) and leave it alone (more or less) for handcoders - it is just a question of editing the preferences.

Best of all N|vu is free and based on on the same codebase as Firefox so it is pretty "standards compliant" - certainly comparitively so.

When you start to edit and create scripts in PHP and whatnot you will need to edit that in a text editor no matter what - the tools discussed above are only adequate for (X)HTML really (and for that matter N|vu won't let you edit CSS or PHP files within the IDE anyway - Dreamweaver though can handle just about any file type another - another of its strengths).

You'll get there and you don't need to use anything other than free software to do it . That being said getting acclimated to Dreamweaver and the Macrodobe tools can only help you grow and be more hireable.

I would wholeheartedly recommend Ian Lloyds new book as you learn to handcode - just finished it and it's my new hobby horse for people looking to learn now

As to editors - DW would be top in my opinion, but to go into exactly why, you'd need to be a little more familiar with how web pages actually work. Fwiw, I use SKedit, which is a text-based editor on Mac, and although DW is on my system, it simply never gets fired up any more. You'd save time and money by learning to code the right way.

I have both, but I don't use them. Code it yourself I have a php editor that I use (can't remember what it's called at the moment and I'm not on my laptop), but I only use it because it tells me the line number, which I use when I debug

The only way you should use MS frontpage is if you are incorporating MS Office features in a web page - you can do a lot with it in conjunction with MS Office, but it puts SOOOOO much extra code in that is essentially useless on browsers other thatn IE.

Dreamweaver is an excellent solution, but I only use it for server side stuff, learn to hand code the easy stuff, I just like to be able to do repetitive tasks with DMX04/8 and make my life easier - but there's still a lot dreamweaver does not do!